Fricke’s Picks Radio: New Tom Petty, New Wave and Detroit Jazz
On the day I talked to ex-MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer about his new album, the instrumental progressive-jazz experience, Lexington, he also attended a memorial service for his collaborator on the record, trumpeter Dr. Charles Moore, who died on May 31st. Their friendship went back to late-Sixties Detroit, where Kramer was tearing it up with the MC5 and Moore was a member of the Contemporary Jazz Quintet, an outstanding modern-jazz group. At a time when Miles Davis was ditching the suits and standards for modal funk and electricity, the CJQ were still pushing at the melodic angles and rhythmic contours in hard bop, with Detroit-native fury, on two fine, rare Blue Note LPs, 1968’s Introducing Kenny Cox and the Contemporary Jazz Quintet and 1969’s Multidirection. The opening piece in this playlist comes from the former. And that is Moore on fluegelhorn, blowing in the brass-band finale of the MC5’s “Sister Anne.”
Some connections over the rest of the hour: recent conversations with Tom Petty, Phish and Eric Clapton on their latest work; Black Crowe guitarist Rich Robinson‘s cover of the Danny Kirwan-era Fleetwood Mac classic “Station Man” at Robinson’s New York show, celebrating his strong, new solo album, The Ceaseless Sight (The End); and my trawling the other night through a shelf of 45s, under “H.”